Category: Big Data

Fitbit, one of the companies making wearable fitness trackers, has sold more than 20.8 million devices and has 9.5 million paid active users as of March 31, 2015, according to Mobilehealthnews.com. That's a lot of consumers using the device to track their physical activity, daily steps, and other vitals related to health and wellness (Fitbit has many integrations with other applications, enabling users to track calories, water intake, and other variables). Most of these users of tracking devices like Fitbit and Garmin may think the data on their activity belongs to them. However, they would be wrong (see our previous post, "The downside of wearable fitness technology").

In fact, not only do those companies own our data, but our own data can be used against us: to date there have been two criminal court cases where the prosecution used wearable device data to make their cases. The potential for courts and even third parties to use the data collected by fitness trackers against us could put a significant damper on this popular category of consumer devices.

It’s almost the time of year for making New Year resolutions, and as always, fitness goals will top most lists. With so many fitness products and technologies available, there are no shortage of tools to help to those goals come to fruition. As reported by Investor’s Business Daily, Morgan Stanley “expects wearable device shipments to increase from 6 million units in 2013 to 248 million in 2017.” Samsung has issued its own research, saying “it expects spending on technology such as smartwatches and fitness trackers to increase by 182% this Christmas, compared with last Christmas.” So is there a wearable fitness device on your wish list—or shopping list—this year?

The options are starting to feel endless. According to Wired, “As of September 30 [2014], there were 266 wearable devices on the market (including 118 fitness wearables), with 23 slated for release before the year is out.” Most fitness trackers monitor activity, steps, calories, sleep, and more. Popular devices come from FitBit, Jawbone, Garmin, Samsung, Microsoft, TomTom, and other technology and sports equipment vendors. Fitness bracelets, for example, monitor everything from your heart rate to your sleep cycle, providing a range of metrics that can be analyzed on smartphones and/or computer applications.

What to do with all this data? Users can decide to increase the amount of time they exercise, add more walking steps to their daily routine, adjust their hours of sleep, or recalibrate their calorie intake. The metrics these technologies provide are intended to help users eliminate the “mystery” behind meeting their own fitness goals, whatever they may be.

But what most consumers don’t realize is a potential big downside to these smart devices: the potential loss of privacy. While the average consumer may think that the data collected lives on their device or in their app, it really lives on servers owned and maintained by the device providers. For this reason, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has called these devices a “privacy nightmare.”

A recent article in MIT Sloan Management Review, "Bridging the Sustainability Gap," details the challenges businesses face in getting investors to recognize--and presumably reward--sustainability efforts. In essence, corporate sustainability efforts are growing in importance, but mainstream investors do not yet view them as relevant. The challenge, as laid out by the article, is that for investors to care, companies need to be able to measure and report on their sustainability initiatives and results. But why measure something few people seem to care about? It's a classic, chicken-or-the-egg dilemma.

The article states, "With modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) technologies and software, it's a solvable problem if management has the will." So maybe now is the time for companies to build and rely on a sustainability performance management dashboard. Corporate dashboards are used throughout many large enterprises and mid-sized businesses to measure, monitor, and make decisions on data for managing finances, operations, risk, and more. If you can measure it, and have trusted data to rely on, chances are you can create a dashboard for it.

Imagine, if you will, that you are sitting in a conference room in Kendall Square on Friday, October 26, 2012. Hurricane Sandy has swept through the Caribbean, ravaged the east coast of the U.S., and is barreling towards New England. Domestic and international flights are being cancelled by the thousands.

On Tuesday morning of that week, MIT Sloan Executive Education is expecting over a hundred executives to attend a hot new program on managing in the era of big data. If you cancel, which surely you must, you will not be able to reschedule this for many more months.

This is the scenario Dr. Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management presented to attendees of theMIT Technology Review Digital Summit. The Summit, which took place in mid-June 2014, examined tomorrow’s digital technologies and explained their global impact on both business and society.

Posted by MIT Sloan Executive Education - 1 year and 2 months and 26 days ago

Thanks to the data revolution—big data coming at light speed from internal and external sources—we have moved beyond the Internet era into the information era, and according to experts, the data revolution is going to make the Internet revolution look like a movie trailer to the main attraction.

But what does this mean for the future of business? How will the information era change business organizations? According to Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor of Information Technology at MIT Sloan School of Management, organizations that can diffuse the outside and internal communication streams into crucial information delivered to key employees will be the most productive and the most profitable.

Posted by MIT Sloan Executive Education - 1 year and 3 months and 2 days ago

The big data gold rush has become a stampede. Technology vendors are racing to bring big data solutions to the market, and companies with a never-ending flow of data are looking to big data to make better sense of their business—and to generate better value as a result.

The challenge is that amidst all this hype, the true value of leveraging big data may be lost as companies continue to operate as “business as usual.” As Tom Davenport, Fellow with the MIT Center for Digital Business, shared in a Booz & Company article, “A lot of [companies] aren’t really thinking differently about what to do with Big Data. Instead, they’re simply asking, ‘How can we use these technologies to save money?’”

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